Live-Blogging Google's Gmail Announcement — Google is sharing more details on forthcoming changes to its Gmail service in a Tuesday webcast. … The changes, which will add status updates to Gmail, could step up the search giant's competition with social hubs Facebook and Twitter.

Introducing Google Buzz — We've blogged before about our thoughts on the social web, steps we've taken to add social features to our products, and efforts like OpenSocial that propose common tools for building social apps. With more and more communication happening online …

Google Buzz in Gmail — Posted by Edward Ho, Tech Lead, Google Buzz — Five years ago, Gmail was just email. Later we added chat and then video chat, both built right in, so people had choices about how to communicate from a single browser window. Today, communication on the web …

Foursquare Signs a Deal With Zagat — Foursquare, the location-based mobile application that is capturing the fancy of hip urbanites, is a fun bar game that lets users compete for points and badges when they go out at night. But recently the service has been branching out beyond its bar-hopping origins.

Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It's Awesome — Sociologists have developed elaborate theories of who spreads gossip and news — who tells whom, who matters most in social networks — but they've had less success measuring what kind of information travels fastest. Do people prefer to spread good news or bad news?

The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul — Youth social networking researcher danah boyd has observed that many people presume the way they use social networks is the way everyone uses them. “I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men,” she says.

No Sense Of Humor, TechCrunch Is Blocked In China — Over the past 48 hours, and perhaps longer, it appears that TechCrunch is being blocked inside China. We've confirmed this with contacts and tipsters inside China who can no longer access our site, as well as through Web tools …

Cisco: The Mobilpocalypse Is Coming!!!!! — Cisco forecasts that by 2014 we will be using 3.6 exabytes a month on mobile networks worldwide, according to its Visual Networking Index figures released today. (For those pondering an exabyte, it's equal to 1 billion gigabytes or half a trillion MP3 files.)

Watching the birth of Flickr co-founder's gaming start-up — Tiny Speck, a company started by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield and three partners, is unveiling its new game, Glitch, on Tuesday. The company has been under the radar since it was founded last March, and no one has known what was being developed.

Facebook Pulls Lexicon Analytics Tool — Facebook has taken its promising Lexicon tool down from the site. Perhaps this happened when they pushed their new redesign. Lexicon, like Google Trends, provided limited yet interesting data on site-wide trends. You can read more about it here.

Smartphone keys get quantum trick — Hand-held devices could soon have pressure-sensitive touch-screens and keys, thanks to a UK firm's material that exploits a quantum physics trick. — The technology allows, for example, scrolling down a long list or webpage faster as more pressure is applied.

With SMS, Twilio Continues to Shake Up Communications — About 25 months ago, when I first met Jeff Lawson, formerly of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the founder and CEO of Twilio, I was skeptical of his chances. After all, he wanted to marry the world of voice to the world of web applications.

Yelp to Open Office in Scottsdale — San Francisco-Based Technology Company Plans To Hire More Than 200 Locally This Year — Yelp (http://www.yelp.com), the community-led local search site, today announced it is opening an office in Scottsdale, Arizona, as it increases hiring to support …

Seagate reveals 10,000RPM 600GB hard drive — Seagate said on Tuesday it is now shipping its Savvio 10K.4 enterprise-grade hard drives. The series is the first to feature a model with 600GB of capacity and a 10,000RPM speed in a 2.5-inch form factor. The drives are said to offer twice …

Standards are the links of the Social Web — Mike Arrington wrote a plea for better social software on Sunday: … What enabled Google to solve the search problem was a common standard for expressing pages and the links between them, so that they could index the webpages and derive a metric for which ones were more important.

Yahoo To Shutter “Yahoo! Tech"* (YHOO) — Update: Yahoo confirms that the “largely inactive” blogs will be phased out altogether. The two active blogs, belonging to Ben Patterson and Chris Null, will be ported over to Yahoo News. — Earlier: Yahoo has posted a notice that its tech site …

1080p streaming not coming to Netflix this year — Editors' note, 4:30 p.m. PST: Netflix now claims that it incorrectly acknowledged 1080p streaming in the company's 2010 development road map. A Netflix representative has clarified that the company plans to bring 5.1 surround and closed captioning …